


The Blue Dragon

by aflyingcontradiction



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 05:27:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12314655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aflyingcontradiction/pseuds/aflyingcontradiction
Summary: Six years ago, a horrible accident at a theme park ruined Toby's life. Now, as a teenager, he runs away to the abandoned park to seek closure.Inspired by the putthepromptsonpaper.tumblr.com prompt "He wandered for hours in the garden of rust"





	The Blue Dragon

Toby scrambled up the ticket booth in one swift motion. From the roof he looked around the deserted parking lot. There was not a single car in sight, let alone any people. He had never been in a place this empty before.

He still remembered when Wonderville had been open for business and it had been next to impossible to get a parking spot some days. He had spent more of his childhood holidays and weekends here than in any other place. James would wake him up well before sunrise and drag him down to the front door where James’s friends would already be waiting, usually in a car so old and beat-up it was a small miracle they managed to start the engine at all.

A loud bang made Toby jump and nearly lose his footing on the slippery roof. It took him a moment to realise it had just been the wind slamming the open door of the ticket booth shut.

Toby looked over to the rusty locked gate, close enough to jump from here and low enough to hopefully not break his ankles when he came down on the other side, if he did it right. He had managed similar jumps in the city, but it seemed more dangerous here where there was not a single other person around to call an ambulance for him if he fucked up. He didn’t even have a phone on him. He’d left it at home so they couldn’t track him down if they came looking for him. And so he wouldn’t give in to the temptation to call his mother.

Maybe this was all a mistake. Maybe he should just leave and not look back. Walk along the road until he could hitch a ride, get out in a town where nobody knew him and disappear to start his new life. But he had to see this place just one last time before he turned his back forever. After all, this was where everything had begun and where everything had ended six years ago on Toby’s eighth birthday.

Toby took a deep breath, ran to the edge of the roof and jumped. He came down with a somersault as he had practised so many times before. Uninjured, but a little disoriented he got up from the dusty ground. The locked gate was behind him, “Wonderville High Street” lay ahead.

Toby let out a triumphant shout. It seemed to echo from the empty store fronts surrounding him. He walked a few steps, then stopped to scrape a faded park map from the sole of his shoe. When he looked up, he found himself face to face with pitch-black eyes in a white face smiling creepily.

“FUCK!”

Toby scrambled backwards and fell. It took him a moment to realise that it was just a plastic statue of the park’s mascot, Wonderbunny. Rain had washed off most of the paint and somebody had broken off its ears. 

Wonderbunny. What a stupid name! 

But he still remembered how he had begged James and his friends to take a picture with whatever low-paid sod had to wear the silly costume that day whenever they had walked through the High Street. James’s friends would groan and call him annoying and a baby. They wanted to get to their favourite rides before the lines got too long. But James would tell them to go away in words that would have made their mother scream “James Jacob Lee!” back then. 

Of course, these days she didn’t care about Toby swearing. She didn’t much care about anything, really, and she only ever screamed when she had one of her breakdowns. 

Toby remembered how Shena had waited in line with them that very last time they had visited Wonderville and how she’d crouched down between Wonderbunny and him and given him bunny ears. James behind the camera had smiled more than the people posing for the picture. He had been so deeply in love. Toby sighed and turned away from the creepy statue.

He was not quite sure where to go from here. He had been picturing this day for weeks now, from the moment he had decided to run away. But his plan had never actually involved anything beyond getting to Wonderville. He just had this strange feeling that coming here would be the best way to end this old chapter of his life before starting a new one.

Eventually he just started walking. His legs seemed to know where they wanted to take him. Nobody had changed a thing since the last time he had been here. The land had been offered for sale, of course, but they hadn’t found a buyer, so they had just left it to rot.

At school the children had gossiped about how Wonderville was now haunted. It had all been a great joke to them. Toby had punched a kid in the face once for laughing about the ghosts of Wonderville and had gotten suspended. Dad had still been living with them at the time.

Toby was walking through the Western Town now. He remembered the place looking old and run-down and dirty, like a Western town was supposed to, with dusty streets and paint flaking off the door of the “Saloon” they used to stage the magic show. 

Toby had been called up on stage once when he had been six years old. He still remembered how proud he had been that day, even though all he got to do was check that the magician’s hat really was empty, seconds before The Amazing Archibald pulled a dove out of it. He had spent the rest of that day bugging James about how he wanted to be a magician when he grew up.

Now the Western Town looked old and run-down and dirty for real and somehow that ruined everything.

Toby started to run past the half-rotten buildings until he reached Futureland. 

For years, this had been his favourite part of the park. He had loved the shiny chrome paint on all the buildings. He had loved the “City of the Future” ride with its animatronic robots, even though it was one of the oldest rides in the park and already hopelessly outdated by the time he had experienced it the very first time. He had loved the smell of the candy they sold in the robot-themed candy stand, even though the sci-fi theming was shoddy at best. He had loved the fact that he never had to pester his brother’s friends to take him to Futureland, because it had the Golden Boomerang, the park’s fastest roller coaster – until they had built the Blue Dragon, that is. Toby winced and tried to put the thought from his mind. He would deal with all that later and then he would forget it and start his new life.

He was standing at the centre of Futureland now, in the green circle painted on the pavement where they used to have street acrobats perform about two or three times a day. Toby could practically see them when he closed his eyes. Forget the magician and forget Wonderbunny, this had been his favourite performance by far. He had watched the acrobats do their cartwheels and back flips and human pyramids, his mouth open in awe. He still remembered when his parents had accompanied James and him to the park the very first time that one summer and he had told them: “I want to be able to do that, too.”

His mum had patted him on the head and said: “You know, these people practice for hours and hours every day. They don’t get to play and goof off.”

“But I want to!”

And James had turned to their mum and said: “If Toby really wants to, he can try. You should let him try.”

And he had tried. And tried. And tried again. And grazed his knees countless times and even bust open his head more than once, but he had not stopped trying. Eventually he had succeeded.

Toby did a few back handsprings around the circle. Maybe if Wonderville had stayed open, he could have gotten a job here, eventually. But of course the place had gone bust after the Blue Dragon incident.

A sudden noise made Toby whirl around. For a moment he thought he saw something move from the corner of his eye and dart into the half-broken door of the nearby restroom. The door was still swinging back and forth a little when he approached it.

“Hey! Anyone here?”

Nobody answered.

Toby peeked into the restrooms. They seemed empty, but he was sure he had seen someone run in. Slowly he walked through the room, checking out one stall after the other. Most of the stall doors had been ripped off their hinges. The stalls were full of graffiti and the toilets were absolutely filthy. In no time at all, Toby had reached the final stall. Its door was closed, but not locked. He bent down to check for feet through the gap, but there were none. But that might mean that whoever he had seen was crouching on the toilet, trying to hide from him. 

He grabbed the door and pulled. It was surprisingly hard to open. Was someone trying to hold it closed from the inside?

With a “Let the fuck go!” Toby tore the door open and found himself facing – a completely empty stall! The back wall was covered in a giant crude sketch of a naked woman. He felt very silly. What he had thought was someone holding the door had clearly just been the result of a very rusty hinge. And a look around revealed that a tiny window was open in the back of the restrooms. Probably all he had seen was a gust of wind making the door rattle.

“Seeing ghosts now, Toby?” he muttered angrily to himself. God, what a wimp he was! He would have to learn to shut that down if he was going to survive on his own.

Toby stomped out of the bathroom, still silently berating himself. He did not look up from the ground again until he had reached the Fairy Woods. When he saw the Dwarf Village ride in the distance, he could not help but smile. The little train ride reserved for the pre-school aged visitors of Wonderville was the first ride he had ever gone on all on his own, the very first time James and him had visited Wonderville together, just the two of them. James had been as old then as Toby was now and the park visit had been preceded by weeks of James arguing with their parents.

“I’ll pay for the tickets myself. Of course, I’ll be careful. No, he’s not going to get kidnapped, I will watch him like a hawk. I’m not going to let him out of my sight. Oh, come on, if I have to wait for you to come with us, we’ll never get to go. You’re always busy! It’s just half an hour from home, it’s not like we can’t call you if we need to be picked up early. Toby has never even been to a theme park!”

Eventually their parents had given in out of sheer annoyance. James and Toby had taken the bus to Wonderville.

Of course, at the time Toby, despite being tall for his age, had barely been allowed on any fast rides at all. Not that he had wanted to. Even the tiniest carousels scared him and he refused to go on them without James. When they got in line for Dwarf Village, he had not realised that James would not be allowed on the ride with him. 

When the safety bar came down and James was still standing outside and waving to him, he had started crying and screaming to be let out, but the ride was already moving. A second later the “Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, friends” song had started playing and as soon as Toby had spotted the first waving dwarf surrounded by dancing flowers, his tears had dried up. He still remembered jumping out of the train at the end of the ride and running to hug James.

“That was so awesome! There’s these flowers and these dancing fairies and one of the dwarves has a beard just like dad’s.”

The dwarf in question also had a bright red nose, was holding a mug of “berry juice” and swaying back and forth. A bit ironic, that.

Without consciously deciding to do so, Toby climbed across the tiny fence surrounding the train tracks and began to walk through the Dwarf Village. The past six years had done a number on most of the animatronics. Their beards, made of doll hair rather than hard plastic, had rotted off. Many of their faces had lost all colour and were just empty beige silhouettes now. Dad-dwarf had even lost his face entirely. His head was now nothing more than a grid of rusty metal. Toby turned away and started walking toward the dancing flowers. They were a sad picture. Half of them had come off their mechanisms and had been blown all over the place, some of the remaining ones were bent and torn and all of their colours had faded to a dull grey.

Without really knowing why, Toby knelt down, picked up the fallen plastic flowers, wiped the grime off them with his sleeves and started to attach them to the little metal pins embedded in the fake grass. He knew they would come off again with the next gust of wind. This was a futile effort. This place wasn’t going to be fixed. Not by him. But somehow he did not want to move on. 

When he was done fixing up the flowers, he began to walk through the tiny “village”, adjusting metal dwarves with half-rotted faces. He wandered for hours in the garden of rust, vainly wiping dirt off the remainders of tiny dwarf jackets, attempting his best to re-attach fallen limbs to their owners without the use of tools.

When he looked up from what he was doing, he realised it was almost dark.

“Aw, fuck it,” he sighed. He had things to do here, he couldn’t just stay in a broken-down old children’s ride all night.

Fortunately Toby had thought ahead. He dug in his coat’s inside pocket until he found the headlamp he had brought.

With his hands free and his path lit, he made his way to where the Blue Dragon building stood. They had never even removed the posts and chains they had used to cordon off the queue area. For no particular reason, he started jumping and cartwheeling over the chains, hopping between the posts, balancing on one leg, then on the other. 

Toby knew he had to stop wasting time eventually. Unless he wanted to turn back now and forget about this whole endeavour, he would have to enter that building eventually – and say good-bye for good.

Toby had reached the entrance now. He looked at the height restriction sign next to the door. All of the sudden he felt like he was eight years old again.

“Oh, come on! He’s barely an inch off. We’ve waited for three hours.”

“I am sorry, but I just can’t let him ride. Safety regulations!”

“Oh, come on, it’s his birthday.”

“I am sorry, but I can’t let him on.”

“They let him on the Golden Boomerang!”

“The height restrictions for the Golden Boomerang are different.”

“James! Get a move on! He can wait at the exit!”

“Don’t be a dick! If Toby can’t come on, I’m not going on either. You can go if you want to, but we’re getting ourselves some ice cream. Right, Toby?”

“Alright, I’ll come with you guys then, James.”

“Aw, you really don’t have to, love. You should go ride.”

“I’m good.”

“No, go! I know you want to!”

“Yeah, but so do you!”

“Are you about done deciding who of you is getting on? You’re holding up the queue.”

“Go, Shena! We’ll meet you at the exit, alright?” James had given her a quick peck on the lips.

“But...”

“GO!”

Toby had been incredibly disappointed. He had even cried a little, but the giant ice cream cone with chocolate sauce James had bought him had soothed his disappointment just a little. 

Afterwards they had tried to return to the Blue Dragon to meet up with Shena and James’s friends. But suddenly the whole Fairy Woods area was cordoned off, there were ambulances and police everywhere, park security was shepherding people to the sides of paths. James had started panicking, asking every single uniformed person they passed what had happened, but nobody could tell them.

It wasn’t until several hours later that they were told there had been an accident. 

Toby dimly remembered hearing something about a short-circuit, a fire in the Blue Dragon building, safety features of carts failing, people in the queue being trampled.   
Then finally the horrible news: Forty injured, twenty-three dead. Shena and three of the four friends with them at Wonderville that day were among the dead.

At first, Toby had just been in shock. It took him a while to fully comprehend what was happening and grieve. He had liked Shena, he’d wanted James to marry Shena so he could have an awesome older sister who liked hanging out with him. He had cried for her. A lot. 

But at the time he had not realised that she was just the first domino to fall. That she would take James with her. His brother had spent two weeks refusing to leave his room, barely eating or sleeping. When their parents had finally given up trying to comfort and convince him and tried to drag him out of his room by force, he started screaming about how it was all his fault Shena was dead, how he had talked her into going on that ride, how it wasn’t fair that he was alive and she wasn’t. How he should be dead instead.

A day later he was. 

Toby’s mother found him upstairs in the attic, hanging from a roof beam by his belt.

Their father was next. He started going out every night, coming back completely drunk at three in the morning, waking Toby up by screaming at his mother about how he couldn’t stand to see her face, how James’s death was her fault, how she should have prevented his suicide. She screamed back that it had been his idea to let James and Toby go to Wonderville in the first place. One night Toby’s father did not return. To this day Toby did not know whether he was alive or dead.

The disappearance of his father killed his mother’s will to live. Maybe the constant fighting had helped give his mum some purpose in life. She stopped getting up in the morning, stopped eating altogether. Eventually she was taken to the hospital and Toby had to move in with his grandparents who barely even knew him. The year it took for his mum to be discharged was the worst of his life so far. His grandparents just had no fucking clue how to handle a boy his age. They shouted at him, smacked him around when he wouldn’t obey their arbitrary rules…

Finally his mum came back home, but she was different from before. Sure, she did all the things she had to do to avoid having Toby taken away. She made him breakfast in the morning, made sure he got to school on time, took a part-time job as a secretary at an office. But it felt like someone had replaced her with a robot. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t cry. She didn’t tell Toby she loved him, like she used to. She didn’t care about the things she had liked and disliked anymore. She just ... existed. 

Except every once in a while when she just started sobbing and screaming uncontrollably for a few hours, only to collapse on the floor and fall asleep.

And that’s how things stayed. It was just too much to take. So finally, Toby had left. And now he was here, standing in front of the Blue Dragon, where all this fucking mess had started and hoping that he could end it here and start something new. 

But when it came to entering the building, he hesitated. It seemed like he could still smell smoke. Of course, he was just imagining things. It had been six years. But somehow he could not forget his classmates’ gossip about the ghosts of Wonderville. It seemed almost natural that he would be greeted by the restless dead the moment he entered the building.

“Fucking hell, don’t be a wimp,” Toby chided himself. He took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The place was pitch-black. Only Toby’s headlamp illuminated the beautifully drawn blue and silver dragons on the walls of the queue area inside. Toby wondered whether somewhere, some artists were really pissed off that their work was now associated with a tragedy and what they would think about him standing here and admiring it. It was odd, being the first person in here since the park had closed down. He let his finger trail along a dragon’s tail as he walked.

A sudden noise made Toby jump. It sounded like something had banged against a metal pipe just ahead of him where the queue area ended. The light of his headlamp did not reach far enough, but he thought he saw something moving in the darkness.

“Hey! Is there anyone in here?”

When he spoke, his voice sounded oddly high-pitched. Nobody answered, but he was sure he had seen something!

Toby started running, the spotlight of his lamp hopping along in the darkness. He reached the roller coaster tracks. A lonely dragon-shaped cart was sitting there, its face looking oddly sad, as though it knew it had been abandoned. Toby followed its gaze along the tracks. He gasped. In the distance, where the tracks disappeared into the darkness of the Blue Dragon building, he had spotted the back of a very familiar head.

“Shena?”

The ponytail of braids whipped around the corner. It couldn’t be. But it was. He was absolutely sure he had just seen his very dead brother’s very dead girlfriend dash around the corner into the darkness. He must be going crazy. This place was messing with his head! But what if it wasn’t? What if, somehow, Shena – or her ghost – was in here?

Toby ran along the tracks to where he had seen Shena disappear. The light from his headlamp was now bouncing so much, he could hardly see where he was going, but he couldn’t stop! He had to find her!

The tracks were rising quite steeply now. A quick look to the left and right and he found the emergency ladder they always installed for safety reasons. Shena must have climbed up it – if she existed, if she wasn’t just in his mind – because there was nowhere else to go from here. Toby clambered up the ladder as fast as he could. In no time at all he was at the top. And there she was! In the distance, on all fours, slowly balancing along the track like she was afraid she would fall. He wasn’t imagining this. He couldn’t be imagining this. His imagination was nowhere near good enough for this!

“Shena! Shena! Wait!”

She started to crawl faster. But she couldn’t get away. Toby didn’t have to crawl. He could balance! He could run! Even if he fell, it was pretty clear that the space beneath the tracks was barely higher than him, he wouldn’t hurt himself. He was catching up fast, never once taking his eyes off Shena. Then suddenly, she dropped down below the tracks.

Toby did not stop to think for even a moment. He just followed her without so much as looking at where he would land. A moment later, while he was running along the filthy, cluttered path beneath the tracks, he realised how badly that could have gone for him. But Toby did not have time to dwell. Shena had disappeared and he had to find her. She had to be here somewhere. If she wasn’t, maybe she had been a hallucination after all. Or – a little voice in his head said – this place was haunted and she was a ghost. Ghosts could disappear anywhere, couldn’t they?

Toby ran all the way to the end of the tunnel to just before the tracks dropped down into the darkness at a ridiculously steep angle. He regretted for a moment that he had never had the chance to ride the Blue Dragon, then immediately wanted to slap himself.

For a second he wondered whether Shena’s ghost had somehow jumped or climbed into the pit below. But it was too far down and there did not seem to be a convenient ladder in sight. The only way down he saw was climbing along the tracks themselves. But Shena had looked so unsteady even while balancing on perfectly straight tracks. She could not possibly have made it all the way down like that. Maybe she had floated.

“Or maybe you’re an idiot who’s seeing ghosts because you want them to be there,” said a niggling little voice in his head. “Shena is dead, you know. She’s not coming back and neither is James, so you may as well figure out what you’re doing here and get it over with.”

Toby stared into the abyss in front of his feet. What was he doing here? He had thought he would find some sort of closure here in Wonderville and could emerge as a new person without the shadow of his brother’s loss constantly looming over every breath he took.

“But you’re not going to leave, are you, James? You’re just going to stick around like a complete dick and ruin the rest of my life.” Toby felt a scream tearing at the back of his throat. “If you didn’t want to leave, maybe you shouldn’t have FUCKING KILLED YOURSELF, ASSHOLE!”

Toby’s scream bounced off the walls of the abyss, echoing all around him. For a moment he wondered what it would feel like to take a step forward and follow the course of the track, follow his brother’s footsteps, feel the thrill of the drop, feel the wind in his hair. Would it feel like riding the Blue Dragon for just one moment before he hit the ground?

Toby had already lifted one foot when a clicking noise behind him tore him from his trance. He dropped his foot and whirled around. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a door in the wall slamming shut a few metres from where he stood. He ran over and ripped it open.

The door led to a dark hallway. There were no murals of dragons on these walls, just large green arrows pointing along the hallway. Pointing to where Shena was standing, only just visible at the edge of the light of Toby’s lamp.

“WAIT!”

She started to run. Toby ran after her. She was fast but he was faster and she had nowhere to go. Just as she tried to escape through one of the doors at the end of the corridor, Toby grabbed her.

As his hand made contact with her shoulder, Toby’s first thought was ‘Huh, I can touch her’. A split second later he realised that this was not Shena’s ghost. This was a very alive, very terrified girl who could barely be older than Toby. All she had in common with his brother’s dead girlfriend were her braids.

“You’re not Shena.”

“Who’s Shena?” whispered the girl.

But Toby did not answer. He was too distracted by the large room he could see over the girl’s shoulders. It seemed that someone had lit a small fire in the middle of the room. The flickering light revealed the bodies of people huddled up on blankets. Toby could see a dishevelled woman and a little boy warming themselves by the fire. Near them, there was a shelf filled with cans, bags and all sorts of odds and ends.

“Wait, do you live here?”

Toby pushed past the girl and into the room. Now some of the other people noticed him. The little boy at the fire was whispering to his mother, his eyes wide with fear, glittering in the firelight. Further back, two of the huddled people had gotten up and were walking toward him. They, too, looked barely older than Toby.

“Do you live here?” Toby repeated.

Now that the others had gotten up, he saw seven people in the room altogether.

“Please don’t call the cops on us,” Not-Shena begged. “We don’t know where else to go!”

Toby thought of Wonderville above them, thought of sunny days and James’s laugh and candy and street acrobats, thought of the Golden Boomerang and the Dwarf Village, all the old sounds and sights and smells. He thought of his father, gone long ago, his mother, gone with him, the prospect of an unfamiliar city stretching out before him and barely enough cash in his pockets to last him a week. 

He looked around the room, looked at the fire and the messy silhouettes around it, looked at Not-Shena’s pleading face, and made a decision: “I don’t either. Can I stay?”


End file.
